This is a weekly - almost - forum for discussion and for the exchange of ideas concerning what it means to be a relevant, growing and more fully committed follower of Jesus. All appropriate ideas and responses are welcome, but everyone is asked to post their thoughts ALWAYS remembering to maintain three principles: (1) Speaking the truth in love. (2) Being devoted to one another in brotherly love. (3) Honoring one another above yourselves.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Is Jesus the right guide?

A couple weeks ago a man named Ed Stafford completed something that no other human being ever did before. He walked the entire length of the Amazon river from its beginning in the mountains of Peru to its end in the Atlantic Ocean. The journey took him 859 days!

Now, I cannot imagine doing something like that myself, but I want to play a scenario out with you. What if you were dropped in the middle of the Amazon Rain forest far from any civilization, with no GPS tracking systems, no maps, no compass, nothing? Like me, you would probably be dead in a short time - maybe even some animal's dinner, but that's another story for another time!

So what would you need in order to reach safety? An expert guide!

You and I would need a guide who knew which way to go and how to get there, how to pace ourselves, what things we could eat and what water we could drink, how to protect ourselves from the elements and from dangerous animals, etc. We would need that guide for our very survival and if someone was offered an expert guide in a position like that and they refused it we would think they were pretty dumb.

But here is the thing, we have all been dropped into similar situations spiritually and far too few of us are really following the guide we have been given. That's right, Jesus Christ, the one, true expert guide worthy of all our trust has offered Himself to us and we have implicitly said "NO."

We haven't made a sign or broadcast our refusal openly, but we have simply ignored Him, acted as if He couldn't really understand our situation or used Him as a desperate source of last resort. Either way, we have tried to go it on our own and not with Him as our guide.

Here is where I want us to think: If Jesus is powerful enough and smart enough for us to entrust our souls to Him for eternity, wouldn't it stand to reason that we should trust our marriages to Him, our jobs , our relationships, our finances, etc.? If He is really our Lord, then He must play the role of guide in our life, leading us out of a dangerous jungle of sin, broken promises and garbage toward the kind of life He created us to live.

What do you think about the image of Jesus as the guide for the direction of our life?What prevents us from trusting Him to guide our life?When He isn't playing that role, what should we do about it?

1 comment:

Found this to be so interesting, the subject matter, and the article, itself.In the book, he Principle of the Path, Andy Stanley uses the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz,to make some points very close to the thoughts found in this blog.Makes for great reading , and just as Dorothy had to keep following the yellow brick road to reach the Emerald City, we have the Bible with instructions as to how we must live in order to reach God's goal for us in life.Also,from an article in the Citizen, from a pastor in Pasadena,"We often worry about what we are to do, how we are to act, if we are to pull ourselves out of our problems. The plain truth is all that we need to do is follow the Spirit and we will prevail in all things for all time,"Think all of these thoughts are so great,and actually can be accomplished, but only with a great deal of prayer and help from the Holy Spirit.Isn't there a Bible verse that says something about the way being narrow and few that find it? HSM